Beautiful melodies like PucciniMassive thrilling orchestras like R.StraussEpic climactic phrases like MahlerHeart wrenching songwriting like ZemlinskyProdigious talent like MozartTragic life story/alienation like Rossini

Korngold covers all the bases. I wish orchestras and opera houses would program his music...

The most underrated opera of all time is Korngold's Das Wunder der Heliane without a doubt. It is a great opera that totally outshines Die Tote Stadt. I don't know if that qualifies him as the best.

I don't think I've added any input to this topic, so I'll say that I personally believe Richard Wagner the greatest composer. He was a brilliant orchestrator and vocal writer, wrote beautiful melodies, reformed the opera world, was extremely innovative, and revolutionized harmony as well as staging for operas. He did it all.

dwil9798 wrote:I don't think I've added any input to this topic, so I'll say that I personally believe Richard Wagner the greatest composer...He did it all.

Except for Chamber Music .

"Greatest" is always hard, because "greatest" is largely a measure of later views of a composer's music. However, I'll say that I think that Bach is a reasonably good answer, if only for his sheer technical capabilities and versatility.

“Wagner is a composer who has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours”“One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time”--Rossini

The first one is a good reason to consider that someone like Bach, who has almost no "awful" moments, someone like Varèse who had the consideration to destroy the works that are not as close to perfect as the extant ones, someone like Monteverdi who has an incredible track record of good compositions through his entire prolific career, or even someone like Chopin whose mature works are all outstanding examples of their kind might be "greater."

perlnerd666 wrote:“Wagner is a composer who has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours”“One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time”--Rossini

"I can never listen to that much Wagner, it always gives me the urge to conquer Poland"

It's true Bach never has awful moments in his music, but by those standards Beethoven would be out of the running due his poor track record. And you have to take into account a composer's innovativeness. Bach was a extremely innovative when it came to counterpoint, but maybe not as innovative with harmony as Gesualdo. And Schnittke was certainly more innovative than Shostakovich, but for different reasons. It's a tough call.

In some way is Liszt maybe one of the greatest composers ever.Even though he is known for his virtuosity on the piano, that is only a small part of his music. He did much more than that. He was probably the first atonal composer (Bagatelle sans Tonalité, which was published in 1885), he was the inventor of the symphonic poem (which later was developed by Strauss), and he was very original. Liszt was also an important figure in the new German school of the 19th centuryCharles Rosen said about the Don Juan Reminscenes that every note was still Mozart, but that also every note proved Liszt originality.What do you think?

My personal opinion of Liszt is that while he may have some inventiveness to his credit, there isn't much else to set him apart from the crowd. His music is melodramatic to the point of being tiresome and overly romanticized (except for a few very, very late works). Really, apart from the works everyone thinks of to demonstrate his inventiveness (e.g. the Bagatelle), his music was rather ordinary, although at least fairly technically skillful (I mean in compositional craft, not piano technique), unlike someone like Mendelssohn. (I really can't understand why that guy is famous...) I think of him as largely a composer of showpieces and encore music, with a handful of works with real musical depth.